With the goal of following the money, we at Grant Watch are tracking trends in NIH outlays.1 Because outlays represent the funds actually drawn down by grantees from NIH grants that have been awarded – where the rubber meets the road, if you will – they are an important way to measure how federal funding is being used to target particular institutions. Max Kozlov, a journalist at Nature, recently reported on an internal NIH email that described this targeting. The email appeared to be sent from the NIH Director of the Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration on April 17, 2025 and stated that “funds have been frozen [for] Columbia, Brown, Northwestern, Cornell, Weill-Cornell, Harvard. Also, HHS/IOS has stated that we should not provide any communications to these schools about whether or why the funds are frozen.”2
When we examined outlays for the institutions named in the email, we indeed find evidence that NIH funding has been withheld. For each set of plots below, we have approximated federal outlays to the institution from the NIH on a monthly basis from the beginning of federal fiscal year 2025 (Oct 2024) through April 2025 (the most recent outlay data). The left graph shows the approximate monthly outlays, and the right graph shows the percentage of all NIH grants to the institution with no monthly outlay. For comparison purposes, we ran the same time series for the same months in fiscal years 2002, 2023, and 2024.3
At Brown, Columbia, Cornell, and Northwestern we see outlays plummeted to $0 in April 2025, with 100% of grants receiving no outlays. This $0/100% pattern is totally different from all previous years for Brown, Columbia, and Northwestern. Cornell has had some variability in outlays in prior years.
At Weill-Cornell and Harvard, outlays are decreasing and the percentage of grants without outlays is increasing, but we do not see the $0/100% pattern. It is possible that May outlay data will reveal a different trend that is more similar to other targeted universities.
We also examined the outlays and percentage of grants with no outlays among the top 10 most funded universities (excluding the targeted institutions above) for comparison.4 Outlays have been a bit more erratic compared to prior fiscal years, but the overall proportion of grants with zero outlays has been comparably small, consistent with prior years.
Our analysis of NIH outlays data – in particular, the $0/100% pattern – is consistent with journalistic accounts of political targeting of specific institutions. We will provide updated data on Harvard and Weill Cornell as they become available.
Footnotes
As a budget refresher, Section 7 of the US Constitution gives explicit power to the Congress to raise and spend revenue, with such measures required to originate in the House of Representatives. Once Congress has authorized and appropriated funding, federal agencies make legally binding obligations to external grantees, followed by the outlay of funding from the federal agency to the external entity.↩︎
This targeted funding freeze was reported by Oza and Molteni at Stat on April 18 2025.↩︎
In March 2025, Congress passed into law and the president signed a measure to continue NIH funding in fiscal year 2025 at the same level at which it was funded in FY 2024 (i.e., the “continuing resolution”.) Therefore, Congress has appropriated the same amount of funding to NIH in both FY 2024 and FY 2025. Under the CR situation, we would anticipate approximately the same amount of funding to be committed from NIH to grantees (i.e., obligations through issuance of Notices of Award (NOAs)) and to be subsequently paid to grantees (i.e., outlays under such NOAs) compared to the prior fiscal year.↩︎
According to NIH RePORT, these are Johns Hopkins University, University of California-San Francisco, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Washington University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Pittsburgh at Pittsburgh, Yale University, Stanford University, Duke University, and University of Washington.↩︎